


The Hard Part of Growing Up

by zombiesbecrazy



Category: DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics), Teen Titans (Comics), Titans (Comics)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Humor, bros being bros, friends complaining about puberty, i have no idea what to tag this, i regret everything and nothing, i think, trigger warning to talking about erections? I don't know if thats a thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-30 01:17:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20806103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zombiesbecrazy/pseuds/zombiesbecrazy
Summary: “You were going to have to start shaving eventually. Barry had the birds and the bees talk with you, right? About hormones and urges and growing hair in new places?” teased Dick.





	The Hard Part of Growing Up

**Author's Note:**

> This as been sitting in computer forever and it's goofy, but here it is.

“Looking a little scruffy there, KF.”

Dick flopped down beside his friend and sank into the cushions. The couch was somehow too fluffy and perfect all at the same time and Dick wasn’t planning on getting up again now that he was off his feet. The week had been exhausting with a breakout at Arkham that he had to go back to Gotham to help with and the ongoing situation with Deathstroke threatening to implode at any second, he was well past the point of collapse. Despite the way that his body usually yearned for nearly constant movement, there were times where it was nice to relax for a while and just accept his fate in his newly chosen home.

He was a couch person now and was going to be for the foreseeable future unless something literally blew up.

He really should have thought to grab the remote before he became one with the sofa.

“What?”

“Face. Beard.” Dick waved his hand lazily in Wally’s general direction. “You look like you’ve been camping for a week. If you go much longer I’m going to change you name to Kid Grizzled.”

Wally reached up, rubbed his chin and let out a frustrated groan at the contact. “Damn it. This is the type of thing Barry never warned me about. ‘_It’s so awesome you’re a speedster now too, Kid’_ he said. ‘_You’re going to love it’_ he said. Not one word about crap like this.” He shook his head and continued to eat the plate of spaghetti he had resting precariously in his lap. Dick considered stealing a meatball before deciding that it wasn’t worth the risk of being stabbed with a fork. Getting in between Wally and his food was dicey on the best of days, but it got treacherous when Wally was grumpy.

“Crap like what?”

“Shaving,” grumbled Wally, who was now somehow twirling the pasta aggressively, which Dick didn’t even realise could be a thing until now.

“You were going to have to start shaving eventually. Barry had the birds and the bees talk with you, right? About hormones and urges and growing hair in new places?” teased Dick, knowing the answer full well.

“Yeah, we did The Talk, doofus. Twice if you count the one my dad attempted and subsequently crashed and burned at. Three times when you throw in health class with the anatomy diagrams and putting condoms on bananas.” Dick laughed, because he didn’t have that at school but Alfred had given him the same lecture but with a cucumber instead and that never stopped being hilarious once he got past the embarrassment phase. Wally grinned in return before continuing. “Barry just never gave me a speedster specific talk. He wasn’t a speedster until he was already an adult so probably didn’t think anything of it.”

“How would a speedster sex talk be any different?”

“Speed, obviously.” Dick must have had a blank look because Wally rolled his eyes and then rubbed his face again. “Dude. I’ve already shaved today. _Twice_. Accelerated hair growth seems to be a new and un-fun development. Probably temporary, but still. Stupid speed force influenced body.”

Dick rubbed his ribs gently and thought about the knee brace currently underneath his sweats. “Yeah, those regenerative powers must be terrible,” he said dryly. He didn’t really think about how he was one of the only ones without some sort of meta power. Growing up with Bruce made it seem so normal to do what they did without supernatural enhancements, but it was at times like these when he was a little beat up and worse for wear that he felt a little bit jealous that he didn’t have any sort of short cut through rehab. He’d gladly accept some extra hair in exchange for his cracked ribcage to be better faster.

Wally must have read his mind, or at least his body language, because he tossed Dick a bottle of ibuprofen that he must have only been carrying in case Dick needed it. He handed over his can of soda as well and Dick swallowed down the medication. “Alright, I’ll admit the perks may outweigh the drawbacks long term, but man, puberty sucks.” Wally took the he drink back and studied the label closely before taking a swig. “Mostly because I’m 19. I thought I was old enough now to be done with this garbage, but apparently not. Between the insane hair growth that makes me feel like a sasquatch and the fact that I’m hard all the time, I’m really getting tired of it all.”

“Upside? You’ll probably win the League Movember pool this year, whereas I have zero chance.”

“Unless any of the shapeshifters cheat, I’m a shoe in.” Stabbing the last meatball on his plate with a little more vigor than strictly necessary, Wally glared at it before popping it into his mouth. “I look forward to that temporary increase in my bank account from my hard earned victory before I immediately spend it on the endless amount of food that I need to eat to survive.” Wally put his now empty plate on the coffee table in front of them, then leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes.

“If you just used the JL credit card that they gave you for food, it wouldn’t be such a big deal,” said Dick. The League had given both Barry and Wally a food fund allowance, but Wally seemed hesitant to use it. “Wait, you’re hard _all_ the time?”

“That is what you’ve gotten out of this conversation?” Wally chuckled under his breath. “Definitely seems that way. Blood flow moving quicker than normal or something? And because my brain is moving fast I probably think about sex a lot more than average.”

“Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Well it certainly doesn’t tickle.”

“Couldn’t you just… take care of it?”

“I’d just be continuously whacking off though. My reload time is insane.”

“That trick might make someone very happy someday.”

“Or incredibly frustrated.”

Sometimes Dick wondered if regular, non-superhero friends talked about these things so openly, but he guessed not since he didn’t talk to any of his school friends about it. _‘Puberty sucks’_ had become an unofficial slogan with their team over the years. With a group of vigilante teens pseudo-living together and going through the usual growing up changes along with unique quirks that no one else could really understand, they learned pretty quickly that it was better if they were just open with each other about it. It was something that they had agreed to after Roy once told Lilith to suck it up when she mentioned having cramps and she had mentally mirrored her own discomfort back onto him, making him curl up in a ball in pain immediately and she hadn’t lifted the feelings for over an hour. Being honest also helped so that someone didn’t get accidentally punched through a wall because of a hormone induced surge of power; both Donna and Garth had accidentally caused significant damage to the tower over the years for that exact reason.

If you can dismantle a giant robot and share secret identities together, there is no reason to hide something as basic as body odor from one another.

“Sorry,” said Dick and Wally opened his eyes again and rolled his head to look at him, eye brow raised in question. “I forget that I have it lucky sometimes. Being a regular human with regular human body problems.”

“It’s fine. Even you had a rough patch, tripping over your own feet. Clumsy Robin was hilarious.” Wally started laughing as the words fell out of his mouth, and Dick couldn’t deny that it was true. Despite still being on the shorter end of the male hero spectrum, he had gone through a big growth spurt where he had shot up four inches in under two months and it completely had thrown off his coordination and balance by happening so quickly. It was like he couldn’t remember how his body moved and it had taken him a long time to figure out how to adapt to his new size and in the meantime he had stumbled, bumped into things and been generally awkward in everything he did. He probably would have thought it was funny at the time too if it wasn’t so damn dangerous in the field. Batman had benched him when he was in Gotham, but that didn’t stop Dick from going out with the Titans. In hindsight, Dick really should have stayed in. He would have avoided at least one tumble down the stairs that way.

Dick scowled and threw a pillow at Wally, smacking him directly in the face with it, which made Wally laugh even harder. “Yeah, let’s all laugh at the fumbling acrobat. I almost knocked my teeth out landing on my face more than once with mistimed flips.”

“You bounced back. You’re bigger and better than ever, too. Still fun sized, but bigger.” Wally scratched his scruff again. Did it somehow look even longer already? It was fascinating now that Dick knew what was going on. “How does Superman cut his hair? Or shave? Or clip his nails? Are there special Kryptonite scissors?” asked Wally.

“I asked Bruce that once when I was little. Apparently he uses his heat vision and bounces it off a mirror.”

Wally’s scruffy features scrunched up as he considered it. “How does that not just break the mirror? If his heat vision has enough power to cut his unbreakable Kryptonian hair that shouldn’t work. If anything the mirror itself would be strong enough to cut the hair.”

“I think you are thinking too hard about it.”

“But the science of it makes no sense!” Wally threw his hands up in the air in exasperation, as he often did when talking about things that he couldn’t explain, like magic. Dick always thought that Wally’s disbelief in such things was funny considering that he regularly faced the supernatural and was friends with actual magic users. Dick thought that the Speed Force should fall into that same category, but Wally accepted that just fine so it was a bit of a double standard. “You’re staring.”

Was he? Probably, but Dick didn’t really mind being busted for it. “Sorry, but now that you brought it up I’ve been watching and I wondered if I could actually watch your hair grow if it’s moving that fast.”

“And?”

“Nothing definitive. Probably need to stare longer. Or maybe if I started watching right after you shave. How long do you think it’ll take for you to grow a full on mountain man beard?”

“No idea, but now I’m curious too.” Wally stood up, grabbed his plate and zipped into the kitchen to drop it off and back again before Dick had a chance to blink. “Alright. Let’s start from scratch then. We’ll start with a cleanly shaven face and you can monitor the situation.” Wally reached out his hand to offer to pull Dick from the couch, but Dick just stared at it and didn’t move. Wally pulled his hand back and ran it through his hair, almost nervously. “Do you want to watch it or not?”

“Yeah…” Dick did want to go with him, for the sake of curiosity, science and knowledge, but he stayed rooted in his spot, “but… _couch_.”

Wally rolled his eyes at him and then crouched down in front of him, facing away, and patted his shoulders. “Come on, Grayson. I’ll give you a piggy back ride and you can watch from start to finish.”

Climbing up took a little more effort than Dick was willing to admit, but he got himself settled on Wally’s back and wrapped his arms around his neck loosely. “Okay, but I’m staying up here until we get back.”

“Koala mode. Got it.” Wally adjusted, making sure not to jostle Dick injured knee, and started walking slowly towards the dorms. “New schedule for the night. Shave, grab some snacks, and then I’m going to pummel your lazy ass at Mario Kart while you keep tabs on the beard growth. Sound like a plan?”

“Best one we’ve had all week.”


End file.
